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Do you ever get a hunch? A gut feeling? Something whispers at the back of your head and it turns out to be right.
Or perhaps you’ve been watching a television quiz show and, before you’ve even had time to think, you blurt out the answer. A split second later you start doubting yourself. How on earth did I know that? Surely, I was just guessing. Yet, more often than not, the answer is correct.
It’s one of the golden rules of quizzing: never change your first answer. Your subconscious often knows more than your conscious mind is prepared to admit.
Why is it that we can produce answers we are convinced we never knew? The reason is that the human brain is an extraordinary sponge, equipped with a retrieval system far more sophisticated than most of us appreciate.
Normally, when someone asks us a question, we begin a conscious search through our mental filing cabinet. Firstly, we decide whether we know anything about the subject at all. If we do, we narrow the search to see whether the specific fact is stored somewhere in our memory. Failing that, we begin piecing together related information to make an educated guess.
Suppose someone asked me who wrote the poem A Lover’s Complaint, published in 1609. I would probably think I had no idea because I’d never knowingly come across it before. But I do know that William Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616 and that 1609 fell right in the middle of his most productive years. On that basis alone, I’d guess Shakespeare - and I’d be right.
The fact that I looked that up while writing this article means it has now joined the vast archive of information in my long-term memory.
Twenty years from now, if someone asks me who wrote A Lover’s Complaint, there’s every chance ‘Shakespeare’ will spring instantly to mind before I’ve even had time to think about it.
That’s because the brain never stops collecting information. Even when we’re making no conscious effort to learn, our eyes and ears are constantly feeding it new material. You may know the answer to a question because you once overheard a conversation, caught part of a documentary while making a cup of tea, or glanced at a newspaper headline without giving it a second thought.
You weren’t paying attention.
Your brain was.
Dreams offer another glimpse into this hidden storehouse. Have you ever woken after an especially bizarre dream involving people, places or situations that you’re certain you’ve never encountered before? Where did they come from?
I like to imagine dreaming as opening every drawer in the brain’s filing cabinet and allowing all those stored memories to run riot. Fragments of conversations, faces you’ve passed in the street, fleeting television images, half-forgotten books, old smells, childhood experiences and snippets of music all tumble together in combinations that make perfect sense to the dreaming brain but none at all to the waking one.
Those strange dream characters you can’t identify may simply be composites of dozens of faces your brain quietly recorded while you were busy thinking about something else. Your subconscious has been cataloguing the world without asking your permission.
The remarkable thing is that this process never really stops. Every second of every day your brain is absorbing, sorting, storing and cross-referencing information. It works tirelessly while you’re awake, and it carries on while you’re asleep.
In fact, there’s only one time when the brain truly stops working.
And, eventually, that moment comes to all of us.
Jackie@JBeedie.com
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